1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus and a client apparatus for managing print data and print job information outputted from plural clients connected to a network to a network printer connected to such network, a print job management system therefor, a method therefor and a memory medium therefor.
2. Related Background Art
In the conventional environment utilizing the network printer, it has not been popular to directly transmit the print data from the plural clients on the network to the network printer. This is because, if the network printer receives plural print data from the plural client apparatus, there increases the load in sequence control and reception process, leading to an increase in the cost of the network printer in order to respond to such load.
For this reason, there is often set a print server on the network, utilizing the operating system thereof. In such print job reservation system utilizing such print server, the printing operation is executed by transferring the print data from a client to the print server, reserving such print data in a specified area of the print server, at the same time managing, by the print server, the order of printing in the network printer designated as the output destination of the print data, and reading and transmitting the reserved print data to the network printer when the order of printing is reached.
In such case, the print server has to accept, for the network printer under the management thereof, the print data from plural clients on the network, so that the load of the print server inevitably increase with the increase in the number of the clients or the network printers. Therefore, in case the reservation medium (for example hard disk) for the print data in the print server becomes unavailable because of an error such as a deficiency in the memory capacity, it becomes impossible not only the reservation of the print data accepted from the client apparatus but also the transmission of the print data to the network printer. For this reason there has recently been conceived a system in which the print server only accepts print requests for the print jobs while the actual print data are retained by the clients, and the client apparatus directly transmits the print data to the network printer after a transmission permit is received from the print server.
In order to resolve the drawback that the printing process cannot be executed by the trouble in the print server, the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-240469 proposes a network print system and an information processing apparatus. In this system, however, since the print data retained in the client are deleted at the completion of the printing operation, it is not possible to reserve the print data, after normally completed printed process, in the server computer.
Therefore, there can be conceived a print job reservation management system provided with a server computer including print end notifying means for judging the available writing capacity of a memory medium of the server computer (assumed as a hard disk of the computer for the purpose of simplicity but composable by a detachable medium such as a mangetooptical disk) and notifying a client computer of print end only in case the data reservation is possible but maintaining an unreservable print job in a waiting state for reservation, a client computer including reserved job transmission means which does not delete the print data at the reception of information for print end from the server computer but transmits the print data and the print job information collectively as a reservation job to the server computer and deletes the reservation job at the completion of transmission, and reservation job management means for reserving the reservation job transmitted from the client computer in a designated directory, deleting periodically the reservation job after expiration of a designated reservation period, and notifying the print end notifying means of an increase in the available reservation capacity thereby enabling notification, for the reservation job that cannot be reserved on the server computer, of print end in asynchronous manner.
In such system, a print job for which the print end is informed is retained in the designated directory of the server computer for the designated period, while a print job that cannot be reserved on the server computer is reserved in the reservation waiting state on the client computer requesting the printing operation. However, the job in the reservation waiting state is reserved in the designated directory of the server computer as the print end is informed in asynchronous manner as soon as the reservation capacity on the server computer becomes available. As a result, there can be prevented a situation where the print end job cannot be reserved on the server computer because of the deficiency in the reservation capacity thereof.
Also in case of reprinting a reservation job reserved in the server computer, if the RAW data alone including the device information are reserved, the reprinting cannot be executed in another printer but is limited to a printer of the identical specification. Therefore, there can be conceived a print job reservation management system capable of reserving the RAW data and the EMF data collectively in a reservation job file thereby enabling reprinting of the reservation job according to the printer of destination. In addition, there has been a limitation that the reprinting can only be made on the same printer if the print data reserved in the reservation job file are RAW data.